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A browser extension being developed for Chrome and Firefox will let Web users create VPN-like connections to the Internet by routing all their traffic through a friend's trusted connection.

Consumer VPNs—like the CryptoSeal service that shut down due to fears over government snooping—let users create secure connections to a VPN provider's data center. The user's traffic is sent to the rest of the Internet only after it gets encrypted and pushed through the VPN service.

The new "uProxy" will work in a similar way except that your traffic is routed through a friend's secure connection before traveling to the rest of the Internet. Both you and your friend would need to have a browser extension installed and running for it to work. You could also use uProxy to route traffic through your home Internet connection when you're out of the house and on a public Wi-Fi network.

"uProxy routes one user's connection to the Internet via a friend they trust," the makers of the technology explain on its website. "Both users have to have uProxy installed. uProxy is intended to allow one user, with a safer and more secure connection to the Internet, to share their connection to the Internet with trusted friends and family, or even with themselves when they travel. By encrypting the connection between the two users, uProxy makes it much harder for an intermediate step on the journey to watch, block, or misdirect traffic."

uProxy would also help users find other uProxy users through chat services like Facebook or Google Hangouts.

The site notes that uProxy "is not designed to be an anonymizing service. Services like Tor provide a much stronger guarantee that a user's IP address is hidden from the target site as well as intermediaries. uProxy does not provide such a guarantee."

The proxy is only for Web traffic and thus does not affect file sharing tools like torrent clients.

uProxy is being developed by the University of Washington and Brave New Software, with funding from Google Ideas. Chrome and Firefox are the first browsers it will come to. For now, it's in a limited release and you can apply for access here.

A Google Ideas event yesterday also spotlighted a new tool for protecting websites from DDoS attacks and a "Digital Attack Map" that tracks DDoS attacks in real time. "Many websites face targeted digital attacks by people who aim to silence their speech. This tool and visualization specifically surfaces anonymous traffic data related to these attacks, letting people explore historic trends and see related news reportage of outages happening on a given day," Google said.

Vpn's are good for privacy , not for anonymity . Either way, i would not recommend using browser extensions for this (or almost anything else). Just set up an openvpn server or several of them and create a private network of trusted friends. Why reinvent the wheel by creating a square one?

Vpn's are good for privacy , not for anonymity . Either way, i would not recommend using browser extensions for this (or almost anything else). Just set up an openvpn server or several of them and create a private network of trusted friends. Why reinvent the wheel by creating a square one?

Alternately, spinup a t1micro on AWS (free to pennies per hour) and use that as your jumphost. Why even *bother* with adding the latency and overhead of somebody else's home connection to your browsing?

Vpn's are good for privacy , not for anonymity . Either way, i would not recommend using browser extensions for this (or almost anything else). Just set up an openvpn server or several of them and create a private network of trusted friends. Why reinvent the wheel by creating a square one?

Alternately, spinup a t1micro on AWS (free to pennies per hour) and use that as your jumphost. Why even *bother* with adding the latency and overhead of somebody else's home connection to your browsing?

Vpn's are good for privacy , not for anonymity . Either way, i would not recommend using browser extensions for this (or almost anything else). Just set up an openvpn server or several of them and create a private network of trusted friends. Why reinvent the wheel by creating a square one?

Because most users lack technical skills to do so.

Perhaps this could benefit people in countries like China, Iran to circumvent the censorship imposed by the governments.

Vpn's are good for privacy , not for anonymity . Either way, i would not recommend using browser extensions for this (or almost anything else). Just set up an openvpn server or several of them and create a private network of trusted friends. Why reinvent the wheel by creating a square one?

Because most users lack technical skills to do so.

Perhaps this could benefit people in countries like China, Iran to circumvent the censorship imposed by the governments.

For those countries, the use of tor is still necessary. VPN seems to be designed for private networks, not so much for anonymous ones. I do not know if is feasible to plug those technologies together to create a private and anonymous network where only a selected group of people knows what the communications are about and who is who.

For a political dissident , keeping your speech secret makes no sense. It would make more sense to remain anonymous . The best bridge so far between your anonymity and the public open internet is Tor.

So....great? I guess I can get my friend in trouble instead of me? Other than bypassing IP blocks because you pissed off some forum mod, what possible purpose does this serve?

Yeah, passing some degree of liability to the friend seems a pretty obvious concern. Especially if it is consensual - if defending the illicit use of an insecure wireless network has been tough, try this one on after you've knowingly given permission. I guess "trusted friend" has to mean quite a bit here.

I acknowledge that there are some good and legitimate uses for such a thing, but it comes with some concerns and caveats.

uProxy is being developed by the University of Washington and Brave New Software, with funding from Google Ideas.

I love the initiative. But doesn't the fact that it is being developed by legal entities that operate on US territory require the developers to comply with NSA requests to accomodate backdoors whenever they show up in a black minivan on campus...?

Let's say I'm in China, and want to search for information about Tiananmen Square. Likewise any of the other countries with repressive internet policies. Having a random American friend help you out with that is probably easier than relying on a commercial VPN service with known/trackable/blockable end-points.

Joy! An extension for people who don't trust OpenVPN or scrutinized VPN services but will gladly trust the security of their web browser and some friend who knows less than they do about internet security. Finally!

But I'm afraid this is targeted toward the wrong platform though, the only people who fall into this category likely don't have computers. Is there a typewriter or fax machine variant on the way?

Vpn's are good for privacy , not for anonymity . Either way, i would not recommend using browser extensions for this (or almost anything else). Just set up an openvpn server or several of them and create a private network of trusted friends. Why reinvent the wheel by creating a square one?

Alternately, spinup a t1micro on AWS (free to pennies per hour) and use that as your jumphost. Why even *bother* with adding the latency and overhead of somebody else's home connection to your browsing?

Because that takes too much effort for the non-techincal person to set up.

Let's say I'm in China, and want to search for information about Tiananmen Square. Likewise any of the other countries with repressive internet policies. Having a random American friend help you out with that is probably easier than relying on a commercial VPN service with known/trackable/blockable end-points.

You should try http://vpngate.net/. It's like this, in that it makes it easy to host your own server, but it allows you to post your IP address on their site for anyone else to use.

Let's say I'm in China, and want to search for information about Tiananmen Square. Likewise any of the other countries with repressive internet policies. Having a random American friend help you out with that is probably easier than relying on a commercial VPN service with known/trackable/blockable end-points.

Can you please move on from thinking Tiananmen is such a big taboo? The main reason that Chinese people don't know about it or choose not to talk about it is that it's more embarrassing than it is inflaming.

Vpn's are good for privacy , not for anonymity . Either way, i would not recommend using browser extensions for this (or almost anything else). Just set up an openvpn server or several of them and create a private network of trusted friends. Why reinvent the wheel by creating a square one?

Alternately, spinup a t1micro on AWS (free to pennies per hour) and use that as your jumphost. Why even *bother* with adding the latency and overhead of somebody else's home connection to your browsing?

I did that. I'm not that technical so it took a bit of googling to get right (there are lots of blog posts out there about it). But it worked great. Don't forget to take some steps to secure the SSH connection, again google is your friend.

Regarding asymmetrical bandwidth limitations, I see this as being more for low bandwidth information requests than getting around netflix region controls. Many commenters here seem to be seeing this from a very US-centric perspective.

Vpn's are good for privacy , not for anonymity . Either way, i would not recommend using browser extensions for this (or almost anything else). Just set up an openvpn server or several of them and create a private network of trusted friends. Why reinvent the wheel by creating a square one?

Sadly that's over the head of too many people.. I would have to guess this idea came about to make the idea more accessible to the masses, but just clicking download on the extension browser.. The same people who are using a Tor bundle from 3 years ago.

That's also a flaw, just because we can create an app to dumb down a service and make it available to users who otherwise would drown in confusion, doesn't mean we implicitly should. You would be better served teaching about the ways VPN works, it's strengths and weaknesses.. Then we wouldn't have any implication that it's great for anonymity. It works for privacy, but probably won't help you evade the ISP for dirty deeds.

Feed a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and feed him for a lifetime.